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This winter, a broad coalition of people disrupted the King County Council meeting where they voted to authorize funds to build the new Juvenile detention center. In response, a judge and several media pundits accused the growing prison abolitionist movement of being a “cancer” in Seattle politics. They also called us “disruptive hooligans” and suggested we need to be repressed. Here is an excellent response from our friend and comrade Bypolar the Toxic Cherub, an emcee and organizer who has experienced incarceration himself and who had dedicated his life to dismantling it.

Cancer or Cure? A disruptive hooligan’s solution to incarceration

As an abolitionist we here over and over again we need prisons, we need police, that there is no viable alternative, that its the nature of humanity. Which is a very kkkapitlist mindset, and extremely untrue, so, you ask what is the alternative? Well lets for this time focus…

This is a guest post by a high school student in Seattle, describing how police arrested her partner with guns drawn outside her school. She reflects on this incident in the context of recent waves of police brutality and anti-Black violence in Ferguson and across the country.

Mis palabras

I have come to an ending point in life on how everything is and has changed. I remember when I was younger, I used to want to be a cop, but now we all don’t like them. Why? Because they are not doing their job.

How are they not doing their jobs? This is how. They go out shooting people for no reason, For example Mike Brown got shot. I feel like it was because he was a black male. To the cops all black people are bad, so if you’re black and you make a mistake, you’re going to deal with them.

Also Trayvon Martin got shot for no reason and police did nothing to the guy who shot him. Who has more say? A black kid or a white guy, of course we all know the answer to that. I feel that police are going around doing this because they think they are better than anyone. Bet you if they take the badge off they would be everyday people like us.

Recently Vonderrit Myers was shot in St. Louis because someone had called the police and told them he had a gun. Once again, he had no weapon. He was just going to buy a sandwich and he purchased it. Another life taken for no real harmful reason, all because they thought to see a gun.

In Louisiana, a 22 year old man named Victor White was arrested, handcuffed behind his back and put in a police car. The police said that he shot himself in the back while he was handcuffed. In the final review of the body, they had said that the gun shot went through the front of his chest, not the back. The police had tried to hide that they had shot him. We won’t know the truth I am guessing, they can say something but the police will be the only ones to know, right?

All of them are black males. To me its discrimination. It makes me think what if I was black would I be walking around scared to get shot, to be worried about my every move, not able to feel safe in my own community? We have cops going around thinking they can just come and shoot people and make it seem like they’re the good guys, that they did it because of danger. No, that’s not right. Can I come in any police’s face and feel like I’m in danger and shoot them, will I have a word to say I was in danger and get away with it? I don’t think so….

Something just happened in my school, a place where I felt safe and we are supposed to feel safe to come. It is no longer a safe place for me. They took some one I care for, my partner, my best friend. The way they took him was the worst. I won’t be able to forget that they had cops everywhere, guns pointing at him. And I bet you they did all this because they thought he had a gun too because he is black, because they felt danger. He is a young man that had done nothing wrong. To come to my school and arrest him in that way… I think to myself every night what if it was his life next? What if they would have shot him just because he was black? That’s what it’s all about now in my opinion.

When I’m alone, I always think to myself what would the world be without the cops? Would it be better or would it get worse? In my opinion, I think it would be better because I can do a better job than they do. I would be able to keep my community a safe place, making sure I don’t discriminate based on your color. I sit back and think how it was back in the day when slavery was happening, how black people had no rights to defend themselves. Is it happening again? Are we going back to something that was worked so hard on to have black people be safe and have rights?

I recently read an interesting article on ADHD which suggested that the genes that cause it are a legacy of nomadic ancestors:

One genetic variation that causes ADHD-like traits is more common in the world’s nomadic peoples. Researchers think that traits such as impulsive behavior, novelty-seeking, and unpredictability might help nomads track down food and other resources. So the same qualities that make it challenging to excel at a desk job may have been an advantage to nomadic ancestors.

I am skeptical about this, given the long history of empires attempting to dominate nomadic peoples, and the roles of education and medicine in this domination. Will this research be used to further stigmatize and pathologize the descendants of nomads who have migrated to the US because their peoples and cultures were destroyed by U.S.-backed wars?

US Empire claims to be orderly, organized, and efficient. It encodes these characteristics as normal, able-bodied, white, sane, male, straight, professional, and healthy. People of color, queer people, gender non-conforming people, indigenous people, and people with disabilities are coded as the opposite of these traits. The system deems them a problem that must be contained like an Ebola epidemic so that they don’t contaminate the body politic.

When schools suggest students with ADHD should be medicated and taught to conform, are they helping students navigate daily life in the empire, or are they playing into this system of control, cutting off potential creativity and rebellion?

I’m wondering what the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari would say about ADHD. They are strong advocates of nomadic ways of thinking and living, and argue that nomadic practices are part of contemporary struggles for freedom. They claim nomadic tendencies exist not only among indigenous peoples but also in the heart of empires, destabilizing them. They say that all human beings have a tendency to deterritorialize, to roam outside of the settled concepts, routines, traditions, and institutions that shape us; they argue this is a crucial part of creative cultural production. Their work has been extended by decolonial, Marxist, queer, and anarchist theorists who aim to destabilize borders, empires, and fixed / frozen social identities. It has also been extended by people who see migration and the creation of diasporas as potential ways to break down and move beyond the constraints of capitalist nation states.

To be clear, I’m not trying to romanticize nomadic life, ADHD, or migration. All of these involve real struggles and real human longings for consistency, commitment, community, and self-organization. Deleuze and Guattari also recognized this when they said that every deterritorialization is also potential reterritorialization. I also don’t mean to deny the practical strategies people with ADHD use to survive day to day life in our society, or the importance of giving youth chances to learn these strategies.

I’m just saying that those genes that express traits labeled ADHD are not vestiges of savagery that must be remolded in the name of progress. They are important expressions of human biodiversity and neurodiversity that could help create new futures. Saying they are not adaptive to modern desk jobs implies that cubicles represent the end of history, humanity’s final resting place. What if nomadic impulses might help us all collectively wander and fight our way to something better? What if they are remnants of courage and curiosity that enable a future exodus from our overstressed, boring society?

The postmodern liberal arts education I received at a particularly progressive Ivy League university gave me the privilege to explore, to roam through concepts, genres, and discourses at will. There were a lot of things about this school that also tried to force me into alienation, despair, careerism, and anxiety. But I did get to spend four years reading what I wanted to and staying up late in the dorms discussing it. If I said something off topic or showed up late it was seen as a mark of an eccentric intellectual, not a problem to be controlled.

Most working class students of color have none of these privileges. They are expected to learn what the system tells them to learn and if they get bored or restless they are punished and stigmatized as defective.

Given that, I wonder: is there a connection between schools’ attempts to keep students on task and the state’s attempts to police and limit the movement of human bodies, especially bodies it encodes as black and brown? Should we be teaching students with ADHD to adapt to the routines of the capitalist empire, or should we be adapting the ways we learn so that youth can unleash their positive forces of deterritorialization? Maybe they’ll end up creating social movements that transform reality and free all of us from cubicles.

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I explored some ways to embrace cognitive nomadism in a previous blog post, Freestyle Learning in the Rhizomatic Cypher. This includes suggestions for how to organize learning activities that build on the power of curious tangents, rather than attempting to herd students into fenced-off fields of study.

I recently had an insightful conversation with a coworker and mentor who has deep roots in communities of color in Seattle. We were discussing cultural competency and how a lot of trainings around that focus on formalized social service techniques and objectified cultural knowledge, rather than informal relationship building, caring, and networking.

This implicitly downgrades the importance of the already existing informal networks among communities of color. It downgrades the agency people have to produce and reproduce culture and resilience in the first place, e.g. the ways in which my coworkers of color know our students’ grandparents, aunties, friends, etc., which builds trust between us and our students.

Instead of teaching people how to honor these relational networks and how to earn a place within them through showing respect, many cultural competency trainings focus on teaching white people objectified sociological knowledge about communities of color; they impart this to white people through a kind of banking-model pedagogy that encourages white people to treat everyone else like characters out of a sociology textbook, as if people of color only exist as the opposite of white privilege. A certain social and emotional distance is maintained.

This results in white people who are hypervigilant about their privilege and are versed in calculating techniques of social interaction with people of color, but don’t know how to actually build mutually caring relationships that could challenge that privilege.

As Andrea Smith talked about, this also ends up reinforcing the white colonial subjectivity, the anthropological mind. People with this mindset are self-critical and self-reflexive, but from a distance. They continue to use people of color as mediums for their own self-reflection, as if people of color exist only to help white professionals check their privilege and overcome their biases.

As a result, cultural competency training never gets to a decolonial process of creating knowledge and selfhood together, through collective power and love.

It also implicitly assumes that people of color cannot overcome their own biases, and that the informal relationships among them are possible sources of corruption or inappropriately emotional connection. It values abstracted, reified, homogenous, and unchanging “cultures” rather than the millions of different ways in which people constantly change their cultures through relating to each other in creative ways.

In this sense, many of the methods through which cultural competency is taught are themselves Eurocentric and culturally incompetent.

There was a hearing this morning concerning Seattle Public Schools’ decision to ban several people from district property because of their involvement in the More4Mann movement. This coalition attempted to challenge the school to prison pipeline by taking back a district school and setting up educational programs attuned to the needs to Black youth. Here is the press release from More4Mann:

9 a.m. Friday, July 25, 2014 Judge Kimberley Prochnau

King County Superior Court, 516 3rd Ave., Seattle

Courtroom E-201 Supporters and journalists encouraged.

The More 4 Mann Coalition of Historic Africatown (in Central Seattle) is continuing to challenge the unconstitutional “EXCLUSION NOTICE” imposed upon three of our members by the Seattle Public School District since last November, in direct violation of the First Amendment.

The three members, Omari Tahir, Greg Lewis and Leight J-K, appealed this decision to the King County Superior Court. Judge Prochnou will hear the appeal at 9 a.m. Friday, July 25, in Courtroom E-201, at 516 3rd Ave..

The Exclusion Notice bans the three members of the More 4 Mann Coalition from any and all public meetings and community events held on any SPS property for one year.

Former Seattle Public Schools social studies teacher Omari Tahir has served as the elected co-chair of the Seattle Alliance For Black Education since 1970. Greg Lewis is a martial arts and fitness instructor. Leith Jasinowski-Kahl is a local longshoreman and community activist who has served as a member of SPS’s Horace Mann-African American Community Partnerships Task Force since August 22, 2013, at the request of outgoing Superintendent Jose Banda. In September, that task force reached overwhelming joint District-Community agreement on thirteen (13) clear recommendations (attached), which the More 4 Mann Coalition continues to support.

We believe this perverse and backward “Exclusion Notice” to have been concocted by loyalists of SPS General Council Ron English, and his old-guard faction within the School District. This is the same School District (and Ron English faction) that has always welcomed the infamous former Urban League chief James Kelly into its facilities, even after he brought a firearm onto Rainier Beach High School campus and publicly threatened people with it in May of 2002 (http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/City-right-to-bring-charge-in-gun-case-1091852.php ).

Last Autumn, Ron English sabotaged the Superintendent’s pragmatic efforts at multicultural dialogue, and abruptly shifted the District’s tone and policy. In early November, the District suddenly and unilaterally began addressing the More 4 Mann Coalition as “tresspassers” instead of Partners. The District also sent a letter to task force member Leith Kahl, threatening to exclude him from Board meetings if he so much as mentioned Ron English by name, title, or pronoun (also attached).

The District still had yet to implement any of these task force recommendations by November 19th, when a Seattle Police SWAT Team raided the Mann building at Ron English’s desire, arresting Leith, Omari, Greg and one random bystander who was not a Coalition member. They were each issued the District’s one year Exclusion Notice at the time of their release the same day. Not a single task force recommendation had yet been implemented by December 12, when we appealed the Exclusion Notice within the District’s internal Kangaroo “appeal procedure”, where it was of course upheld by THE SAME PERSON WHO HAD WRITTEN IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. Not a single recommendation had been implemented by December 19th, when we appealed this matter to Superior Court.

Since then, we are happy to report that at least ONE important task force recommendation was achieved, when SPS signed an interim re-location lease agreement with one of the More 4 Mann Coalition’s affiliated organizations. However, to date, less than four out of the thirteen task force recommendations have been achieved.

The programmatic and visual presence of ALL Africatown activities have been, at least temporarily, displaced from 2401 E. Cherry Street, the historic heart of Africatown. This was the opposite of both the letter and spirit of the task force’s recommendations, and of the School District’s stated intent in convening that task force.

A few years ago, one of my students told me something that made me furious at the U.S. government: she said she was afraid to come to school because she thought ICE might show up in the classroom to deport her. We strategized together about what to do if this happens.

I was left outraged that we even had to have this conversation. The classroom should be a sanctuary where all students can learn, without having to worry about being kidnapped by the state and removed from their families and communities.

This was just as heartbreaking as when another student asked me if you need to purchase a password in order to become an American citizen, as if the United States is a VIP club that is simply too expensive for people from his community.

These kinds of situations are becoming increasingly common; students will come in to class depressed, worried their parents or siblings are about to be deported. Many are from working class immigrant communities that are slated to be left out by all of the comprehensive immigration reform proposals tossed back and forth in Congress. They are the ones the Democratic Party is willing to jettison and the Republicans are ready to demonize as the “bad immigrants”, not the good Dreamers. Many of them have gotten entangled in the criminal justice system because of racial profiling or because they had to hustle to get by since they can’t access legal jobs. They can’t afford college because of rising tuition. They are marked as gang members simply because of the neighborhoods they live in. When congresspeople talks about increasing security, they mean kicking out people like them.

But where are they supposed to go? Many Mexican youth can’t find jobs in either the US or Mexico, and are facing violence in both places. They are a generation that is getting squeezed out of both countries, and have nowhere to go unless they fight back. They are the North American cohort of millennial youth, children of the economic crisis who are facing a precarious future. This generation is rising up all over the world, from the Arab Spring to the migrant worker strikes and riots in China’s Pearl River Delta.

Many of the mainstream immigrant rights groups don’t want to take up their cases because it is seen as too difficult to convince the government that they “deserve” to stay. But when I talk with them, I don’t see threats to national security, I see intelligent, caring, creative young people who are active in their communities and are trying to build lives here.

As a teacher, I feel blessed to be connected with undocumented activists who are developing innovative organizing strategies for stopping deportations. The National Immigrant Youth Alliance is at the forefront of an emerging movement of undocumented folks who have been reuniting families torn apart by deportation, particularly through the recent Bring Them Home actions.

If I weren’t connected with these folks I’d be depressed and helpless when my students share these stories. But now I can suggest some ways they can build solidarity to stop deportations, and I know there are skilled activists who can support them in this, people who come from similar backgrounds and have faced their fears together.

For this reason, I strongly encourage readers to support NIYA’s current efforts to free four young people from immigration detention. One of these youth was deported right from his high school classroom, and has been imprisoned in detention for 71 days after trying to cross back into the U.S.

As a history teacher, I often facilitate conversations among students about past social movements such as the civil rights movement and Chicano/Chicana labor struggles. Students will debate whether or not things have gotten better since then. I think that 40 years from now we will remember stories of students being deported from our classrooms and will see ICE’s practices as barbaric, analogous to the oppression communities of color faced before the 1960s. But that will only happen if we all take action to prevent the state’s ability to kidnap, deport, and imprison youth today.

Reading for Revolution is a three-part series of short articles that I wrote on collective learning and the struggle for a new society.

The first article, “Steal the the Ability to Read this Book,” makes a case for seizing the reading skills that slave-masters and capitalist bosses have systematically denied oppressed communities.

The second article, “Clowns to the left of me, Leninists to the right, here I am – Chillin and reading with you…,” argues for developing a learning praxis (reflective practice) that can break from the alienated and oppressive dynamics of capitalist classrooms.

The third article, “DIY Study Strategies,” is more practical, offering suggestions for how to start your own revolutionary study group. I argue that how we read to make a revolution is different from how we are taught to read in school. I attempt to outline some of the more revolutionary…